[Distutils] Handling the binary dependency management problem

[Nick Coghlan]

On 5 December 2013 19:40, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4 December 2013 23:31, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hmm, rather than adding complexity most folks don't need directly to the
>> base wheel spec, here's a possible "multiwheel" notion - embed multiple
>> wheels with different names inside the multiwheel, along with a
>> self-contained selector function for choosing which ones to actually install
>> on the current system.
>
> That sounds like a reasonable approach. I'd be willing to try to put
> together a proof of concept implementation, if people think it's
> viable. What would we need to push this forward? A new PEP?
>
>> This could be used not only for the NumPy use case, but also allow the
>> distribution of external dependencies while allowing their installation to
>> be skipped if they're already present on the target system.
>
> I'm not sure how this would work - wheels don't seem to me to be
> appropriate for installing "external dependencies", but as I'm not
> 100% clear on what you mean by that term I may be misunderstanding.
> Can you provide a concrete example?

If you put stuff in the "data" scheme dir, it allows you to install
files anywhere you like relative to the installation root. That means
you can already use the wheel format to distribute arbitrary files,
you may just have to build it via some mechanism other than
bdist_wheel.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia